Re: Ada Microkernel?

[gerhard.nospam@bigfoot.de (Gerhard Häring)]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001 02:16:34 +0100, Chris Campbell wrote:
>[...]
>> OOP code itself is not inherently slow, but rather it happens to be a
>> result of the compiler or interpreter being used.
>
>That brings up an interenting point about Ada compilers and OO, specifically
>GNAT which is what most use i think.  I see very little in the Ada 95 language
>design that would need tied to an OS, but how much is there in practise?  There
>is no point saying use OO in the kernel if the compiler uses some system
>specifics to achieve it.  The only solution would be to modify GNAT which would
>be costly if it did need it.  I ask since ppl have been pointing out the
>_potential_ uses for OO in the OS in other and in this group(s), and i plan to
>modify GNAT to support exceptions -- or more specifically the reporting of
>exceptions -- without the need for system specifics.  I might be willing to do
>something similar for objects if it's possible and providing it would be of
>benefit to ppl.  I won't do it if it's like C++ RTTI and will need substantial
>modifications to make it run.  Hopefully considering Ada's embedded and systems
>programming history this won't be an issue though.

Last time I tried to do OS programming with GNAT, I couldn't create dynamic
objects, because the GNAT runtime calls malloc, which doesn't exist in the
Linux kernel. kmalloc does exist, of course. Have you already looked into the
GNAT sources, how hard do you think it is to write a new runtime for
kernel-level programming? Are there enough docs in the GNAT sources that
describe how to write a new runtime? OK, I should of course check that myself
...

IIRC ACT are selling a GNAT version that targets RTLinux (also kernel-level),
so it must be possible.

Gerhard
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